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ASL Grammar / linguistics: syntax: order of introduction:
Topic: When describing complex situations what do you start with first? The big thing? The small thing?
Many ASL teachers will tell you to name the concepts in your sentence starting from largest working on down (house, room in house, desk in room, drawer in desk, open it, pull out a oblong box, open the box, my glasses (or whatever), bring to here, you mind?
However that is overly formulaic. In other words that approach is a formula or a general rule but not
and not necessary the best real life grammar (rules for constructing of sentences) choice depending on context. Large to small, external to internal, etc. is good for introducing a concept to someone who has no idea about or a limited understanding of that concept. Big to little phraseology helps build context. However, if a person has a pre-existing understanding of something and context already exists – if you (as a signer) engage in an elaborate external to internal large to small type of context building process you will cause your conversation partner to want to find a different conversation partner.
Context and existing knowledge matter when deciding what syntax (word order or sign order) to use.
BOX CARRY-to CAR, do-you-MIND?
vs
CAR? (pause) (body shift) BOX CARRY-to, do-you-MIND
In the second example notice that there is a very small "pause" to topicalize the car. Then there is an extra body shift to the location of the box..
The extra pause and the extra body shift create a very small extra amount of work that is unnecessary when telling someone to take a box to your car – when you don't care where in the car the box ends up and/or you trust the person to have common sense to put it in the back seat or perhaps in the trunk. Signing in ways that take extra time, add extra pauses, or require extra body-shifting (in order to add context to an already sufficient context situation) is wasteful and simply not appreciated by native Deaf who want you to get to the point.
So I'm going to suggest to you that a lot of ASL teachers and/or content creators all too often instruct you to sign in ways that are generally only appropriate in very low context situations but don't actually work that well in everyday life when conversing with the people in your life who know you and know about you.
It won't happen bur imagine if every practice sentence presented to a second language learner of ASL would come with a "context indicator" such as:
Context: Your conversation partner is entering this conversation having no clue as to what you are talking about.
or
Context: Your conversation partner does this for a living, could do it with their eyes closed, their eyes are open and the referent is in plain site.
In each of the above contexts the same information might properly be conveyed via extremely different grammar.
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